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Re: TERMINOLOGY: Re: another new language to check out

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Thursday, July 1, 2004, 21:17
John Cowan wrote:
(re L-1 Esperanto speakers)
> Yes indeed. There are between 200 and 2000 such people, depending > on whom you ask. The overwhelming majority of them are children of > marriages that have no other language but Esperanto in common; in all > cases, the children are bilingual in the local language as well. >
Not unlike the situation with many Indonesian couples from different ethnic groups; the parents have only Bahasa Indo. in common, the children of course grow up speaking it (and perhaps one or other of the parents languages depending on locality, but even that's rather rare I think.) One of my colleagues in Indonesia was a Batak, a once quite fearsome group that was Christianized only in the mid/late 19th C. He was married to a Javanese woman. His favorite story-- meeting her parents during their courtship, he knew enough Javanese to catch one of them harumphing, "But he's a headhunter!"